Tag Archives: humor

Let’s imagine we have a philosopher, who has an audience, that gladly listens to his thoughts. Let’s then imagine an other audience (A2), who begins to consider our philosopher’s thoughts as waffling.

The philosopher asks from A2, what is the smallest contention between waffling and philosophizing he can make. After he has agreed about this question with A2, he begins to philosophize from this point with a little (agreed) gap to both directions from the agreed point where he could still be considered a philosopher.

After some time A2 again considers our philosopher a waffler not a philosopher. Our philosopher continues to reduce his thoughts with an agreement with A2 so that A2 at first considers him a philosopher again, but always after a while considers the philosopher a waffler.

Eventually A2 considers the philosopher only a waffler not a philosopher at all. All he says is only some kind of nonsense.

Now the audience that gladly listened our philosopher at very beginning and continued to consider him as a philosopher starts to invent new kind of philosophy thinking the difference between philosophy and waffling, particularly the psychology about what changes other audience’s view to consider something waffle rather than philosophy.

Perhaps even new school of thought arises with whole new theories. Lots of work for many future generations. Now, how would A2 react to this new school of thoughts? Would they consider all those people as wafflers?

Image courtesy of atibodyphoto at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Since this is some kind of humor of mine and just short little story, below is the original Finnish version of it. As some people probably notice, in my translation some spirit of the original story has been lost.